Maarten Van Severen was a Belgian furniture designer and interior architect. He designed his first furniture pieces in 1986 and in the following year established an independent workshop, where he pursued the limited, semi-industrial production of his own furniture designs. He came from an artistic family - his father was the abstract painter Dan Van Severen while his brother, Fabian Van Severen, is also a designer. He started collaborating with Vitra in 1996 which marked a new phase in his career. It offered him the opportunity to work with new materials and also brought a much wider degree of exposure and influence. Until his death in 2005 in Ghent, Maarten Van Severen developed a range of new designs for Vitra, which have progressively entered series production.
